Three local writers will discuss the how and why of writing groups April 23 at the Madison College panel presentation titled “Writing Groups: How to Start One, Join One, and Sustain One.” Attendees will have the opportunity to network with other writers seeking groups.

Poet, essayist, and translator Catherine Jagoe; Michael McDaniel, member of the Word Craft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers; and Guy Thorvaldsen, poet and writer for radio, will discuss why writers need peer-feedback groups and how groups can be created and maintained. The Writer’s Life Lecture Series event will be held at 7 p.m. in Room 240 of the Madison College Downtown campus, 211 North Carroll Street. The event is free and open to the public.

Jagoe, a member of the Madison poetry group Lake Effect for almost twenty years, is a freelance translator and writer whose poetry and essays have appeared in Gettysburg Review, Chautauqua, American Athenaeum, Contemporary American Voices, North American Review, Ninth Letter, and Atlanta Review. She is winner of the 2014 Kay W. Levin Prize for Short Non-Fiction for the Council for Wisconsin Writers. Her latest chapbook, News from the North, recently appeared with Finishing Line Press.

McDaniel currently co-leads a writers group at the Oakhill Correctional Institute as part of the University of Wisconsin's Oakhill Prison Humanities Project. He is a member of the Word Craft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers, an organization dedicated to emerging Native writers around the world. He teaches literature and writing courses at Madison College and at the Wisconsin School of Business.

Thorvaldsen, also a writing instructor at Madison College, is a longtime member of two writing groups: a Public Radio Collective, and a fiction/non-fiction group. He has led workshops on writing groups at Wisconsin Book Festival events. His poetry, nonfiction, and fiction have appeared in The Alembic, The Aurorean, Carve Magazine, The First Day, Forge, Gulf Stream, Little Patuxent Review, Perfume River Poetry Review, Zone 3, WI Academy Review, and Verse Wisconsin. He received the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets 2013 Kay Saunders Memorial New Poet Award.